


Makeover

by Penthesilea1623



Series: Come Back Home [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 19:10:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1110495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penthesilea1623/pseuds/Penthesilea1623
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short story from the Come Back Home universe.  Takes place just before Horizon and inspired by this <a href="http://penthesilea1623.tumblr.com/post/71667208910/i-just-posted-a-short-mass-effect-one-shot-on-ao3">picture</a>.</p><p>It always bothered me that Shepard "wakes up" in Mass Effect 2 with a full head of styled hair.  This story takes place immediately before and after the events on Horizon and explores the friendship between Jack and Shepard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Makeover

“Your hair looks like shit Shepard.” Says Jack, leaning against one of the columns in the mess.

Shepard looks up from the datapad she’s been reading. She knows it’s Jack from the sheer number of blurred tattoos she can make out. She blinks and rubs her eyes and the biotic comes into focus. Damn Cerberus optics. There seems to be some issue with pupil dilation, though that sinister red glow that she had when she’d first “woken” is at least gone. Mostly. She’ll have to ask Chakwas to take another look at them, but later. For now she’ll have to make due with old fashioned sunglasses. She’d found a pair in a market in the lower wards on the citadel the last time they were there. She’d bought them on whim. They'd reminded her of the glasses John Lennon wore when he started his solo career. Garrus and Kasumi had just stared when she’d made the reference and suddenly she’d missed Kaidan even more. He’s one of the few who shares her passion for classical 20th century music, even if he tends more towards jazz than rock or pop.

She almost reaches up to touch her hair, but stops herself in time. “Talk to Miranda. Apparently my hair wasn’t a priority when Cerberus brought me back.” Unsurprisingly her hair hadn’t made it during her freefall through the atmosphere of Alchera. She misses it. Long and straight and to the middle of her back. She’d worn it that way since she was a teenager on Mindoir. She feels strange without it. Jack is right. Her hair does look like shit. Un-styled, uneven, and short, not even to her shoulders. She’s been so busy since she’d ‘woken’ she hasn’t thought about it. The implants that glow red through her skin and her eyes are more distracting when she happens to glance in the mirror, which isn’t often. She looks back at her datapad.

To her surprise, Jack doesn’t leave. “I could cut it for you.” She says suddenly.

Shepard looks up and raises an eyebrow. “You can cut hair?” She asks eying Jack’s shaven head.

Jack scowls. “Fuck you, Shepard. Just because I shave my head doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about hair. Shit. Even if you shaved your head your hair would look better than it does now.” She storms off, barreling into Garrus who’s just coming into the mess. 

He sits down across from Shepard. “Is it just me or does our charming biotic seem a little upset?”

Shepard sighs, and rubs her hand across her eyes. “It’s my fault.” She says pushing herself up from the table. She stops by the medbay to borrow something from Dr. Chakwas and heads down to Jack’s hidey hole in Engineering.

Jack’s sitting on her cot, and glares as Shepard walks up to her.

Shepard doesn’t say anything just places a pair of scissors on the cot in front of her.

Jack looks at them and then looks at Shepard. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with those?”

Shepard just sighs. “You can either stab me with them or cut my hair. At this point I’m not sure I care.”

Jack gives her a suspicious look. “You’re fucking weird, you know that?” After a moment she reaches out and picks up the scissors. “Sit on that crate over there.”

Shepard offers a silent prayer to that god she stopped believing in after Mindoir and goes to sit on the crate.

She doesn’t actually see the haircut until after Jack has finished and they sneak up to the restrooms on the crew deck. Just to piss off EDI she goes into the men’s room and ignores the AI when she points out that the women’s room is on the other side. Jack smirks when she does. 

Shepard steps up to the mirror and stares at her reflection. She turns her head and then smiles slowly. She likes it. It’s very Great Gatsby meets punk rock. A short bob, really short, not even coming to her earlobes, with bangs to mid forehead cut absolutely straight, an emphatic black line. “It’s fantastic, Jack.”

It’s a completely different look and that seems right. A new look for a new Shepard. She wonders what Miranda and her boss will say. They’d wanted to bring back the old Shepard. 

She catches sight of Jack in the mirror and sees the woman is almost smiling. It quickly disappears when she notices Shepard’s watching her. 

“You need some fucking makeup.” Jack says, reaching into one of the compartments in her cargo pants. She pulls out a lipstick and tosses it at Shepard.

Shepard catches it and stares. “You keep makeup in your pockets?”

Jack just shrugs. “What the fuck did you think I kept in them? Grenades?”

“It didn’t seem that improbable.” Shepard admits. 

Jack seems to hesitate for a moment as if she’s trying to decide whether or not to get angry. “Fuck you.” She says eventually, but there’s no heat behind it, and she has a smirk of a smile on her face.

Shepard is smiling as well as she unscrews the lipstick and applies it. It’s that same dark red, almost maroon, that Jack wears. She never wore lipstick on the SR-1, only lip balm or clear gloss. She rubs her lips together and looks at herself. Her lips look fuller, and almost startling to her, but she decides she likes it. And for some reason her eyes don’t seem to be glowing at all today. “You got any mascara in one of those pockets?” She asks Jack.

Jack just smiles, and unbuttons another pocket. 

 

Less than twenty-four hours later, and Shepard isn’t smiling anymore. Jack isn’t quite sure what happened on Horizon other than some screwed up Collector shit, but Shepard’s locked herself in the Starboard Observation Deck and isn’t talking to anyone. Everyone on the ship seems agitated, but no one seems to know exactly what happened. She finally goes and asks that jackass pilot. 

For someone who normally won’t shut up Joker’s explanation is remarkably brief.

“Shit. She’s this screwed up over some old boyfriend being an asshole?” Jack asks.

To her surprise Joker loses it. “Fuck you, Jack. You may be so psychotic and so completely messed up that you’re incapable of having any kind of relationship, but Kaidan and Shepard weren’t just boyfriend and girlfriend. They fucking loved each other. The kind of love that made you believe in all those corny movie endings, sailing off into the sunset, happily ever after, all that shit. They should have had that! They deserved it. And now they aren’t going to and it’s my…” His voice cracks like he’s actually going to cry or something and he turns back to his display. “Why don’t you just crawl back to your hole in engineering?”

After telling him to fuck himself, Jack starts to do just that, but ends up getting off the elevator on the crew deck. The cheerleader and that perky one who claims to be the ship’s counselor are arguing in hushed voices. 

“I tried to talk to her about it, Miranda. All she said was it was good to see him. She wouldn’t say anything else.”

“Then why the hell has she locked herself in the observation lounge?” The cheerleader hisses. “He’s not going to like this. Not at all.” She looks up and sees Jack and quickly ushers the other woman into her office, closing the door behind them. 

Enough of this shit, thinks Jack and heads over to Starboard Observation. She pounds on the door. “Open the fucking door, Shepard.”

No one answers. Jack lets her biotics flare and shoves them at the door control. It doesn’t so much short out as it just flies apart, letting Jack easily push the door open. 

Shepard’s standing by the window. She raises an eyebrow. “Did you just break my ship?” 

For someone that everyone thinks is having a breakdown she seems to have her shit together, at least until Jack gets closer and sees how red her eyes are – bloodshot, not just the weird glowing shit Cerberus has done to her, even though you can see that too.

“You have my fucking lipstick.” She tells her.

Shepard laughs, though it’s a pretty tired laugh. “You can have it back. It’s not really my shade as it turns out.”

“Maybe something in a fuck-you red.” 

“Yeah.” Shepard says wearily. She leans her head against the glass. “He said I'd betrayed him. That I'd changed.” She says softly after a minute.

Jack doesn’t know what to say. She’s never done this girly confidence stuff. “Men are assholes.” Shepard doesn’t answer and Jack moves tentatively closer. “Doesn’t it freak you out, standing in front of that window? Didn’t you get spaced?”

Instead of moving away Shepard actually turns and faces the window, resting both hands on the glass by her head. “I did. But no, it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s beautiful. All those worlds. All those stars. I don’t think I’d want to go on a spacewalk anytime soon, but I still think it’s beautiful.”

“You’re fucking weird, you know that?” Jack finally says for the second time in less than a day.

Shepard laughs out loud and it sounds almost normal. She straightens up and turns away from the window. “I do actually. It’s how I know I’m me, no matter what Cerberus did to me when they brought me back. No matter what Kaidan thinks.”

Jack thinks about it. “That’s kind of cool actually.”

Shepard doesn’t answer.

“I hear we’re heading to Illium.”

“Yes.” Says Shepard, suddenly all business. “We’re picking up another two recruits. Checking them out anyway.”

“I know some great clubs on Illium.” Jack offers.

Shepard smiles at that. “I’m not much of one for dancing, Jack. It’s another reason I know I’m me.”

Jack doesn’t quite understand that so she ignores it. “There’s more to a good club than dancing, Shepard. We could just get shitfaced. It’d do you some good. We could get shitfaced and see just how much we trouble we could get into to piss off the Cerberus cheerleader and the Illusive Man.”

Shepard’s smile turns into a grin. “We could do that.” She nods her head as she thinks about it. “Yeah. I think I’d like that.”

Jack smiles back. “Yeah.” 

“It’s a date. Shore leave. As soon as we get to Illium.”

“Cool.” Jack starts to leave but stops and turns around when Shepard calls her name.

“You really think ‘fuck-you’ red is my shade?”

Jack grins. “Oh yeah, Shepard. Oh, yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> photo inspirations and other Mass Effect related things can be found on my tumblr: [Come Back Home inspiration/style references](http://penthesilea1623.tumblr.com/search/Come+Back+Home)


End file.
